Artistic License
by Xairathan
Summary: AU in which anything you write on yourself will show up on your soulmate too. Convenient, right?
The phenomenon known as "The Writing" shows itself at around age fifteen, give or take a few months. Asuka supposed it's so children wouldn't go running around with crayon and paint marks stuck to their foreheads, but not so late that people would start spontaneously manifesting matching tattoos. She never really saw the point on writing on herself, aside from the quick note or two, so that wasn't much a problem.

The same could not be said for her partner, her soulmate, whatever- and it annoyed her to the point of irrationality. Her Writing started showing up one day in class, creeping idly down her arm with a quiet tickling sensation that Asuka passed off as the wind blowing in from the windows. But then she felt Hikari poking her side, and Mari started giggling behind her hand, and Asuka had to look down.

There, spidering across the lines of her skin like so much spilled ink, was an intricate pattern of what appeared to be vines and flowers. As if that wasn't insulting enough, they were blue, Asuka's least favorite color. She rubbed at one of the vines, outlined in black, and when that failed, she began to scratch it with her fingernails. No matter what, the pattern stuck stubbornly to her, even when she drew blood.

The teacher looked up at Asuka's long, frustrated groan. She quickly pretended to be reading the textbook, flipping one page back and forth like she was confused by what she was seeing. The teacher bought it, and resumed his lecture, at which point both Mari and Hikari leaned over to examine Asuka's arm.

"Wow, that's pretty," Hikari said, following the still-spreading pattern with her eyes. The petals of another flower appeared somewhere near Asuka's elbow, growing darker with the careful application of what must've been a pen before slowly taking on a bluish color to match the sky. "You're lucky, Asuka. You've got an artist."

"I'd rather have no one," Asuka fired back, still rubbing the pattern in irritation. "This is stupid. Mari, give me your pen."

"Sure, Princess." Mari winked and tossed her Sharpie over to Asuka, who uncapped it and scrawled on the back of her left hand in large letters, 'STOP'.

And stop the pattern did, just above the crook in her arm, leaving one flower uncolored and looking woefully unattractive. Asuka rubbed the ink from her hand, wiping it off her skin. She at least could be courteous when need be.

Then a series of small letters unfolded themselves just under the knuckles of her right hand. 'Sorry'. The letters themselves seemed timid, like they were afraid to intrude any further upon Asuka's space- and damn right, they should be. She huffed with satisfaction, but couldn't help glancing back at the improvised drawing on her arm. Without the coloration of that final flower, it looked mismatched, pathetic.

Grabbing Mari's pen again, she wrote, 'at least finish what you started'. The tiny apology vanished from her hand, and for a long moment, there was nothing. Asuka watched her arm expectantly, tapping her fingers against the spine of her textbook. Then that light shade of blue unfurled itself over the flower, painting it to match its comrades, and stopped just within the black marks of the outline.

'Much better', Asuka wrote, and she had just put the pen down to erase that when a thought came to her. 'What's your name?', she added, and then erased it.

'Rei', the small letters replied. It sounded like a guy's name, Asuka thought, writing her own name underneath Rei's. Great, a guy who liked to draw. She couldn't have gotten anyone else, could she? Her name was common enough to make her hard to find, and not everyone went to look for their supposed soulmates right away. A lot of people didn't even meet them; some died before they could, others just walked away from that decision. She could be one of the latter.

Still, she couldn't keep herself from looking down at her hand, opening and closing her hand and watching the letters dance across her skin. Rei. As she stared at her hand, the letters slowly began to fade, rubbed away by an unseen hand. Asuka grabbed Mari's pen and quickly traced them, doing her best to keep her writing identical to Rei's.

The two names sat there on her hand, gleaming innocently under the classroom lights. Asuka passed the pen back to Mari with a sigh of what couldn't possibly be relief, but something similar. Exhaustion, perhaps.

"Rei, huh?" Mari said. "Sounds cute. Totally not your type."

"Can it, Four-Eyes," Asuka groaned. "Your partner won't stop writing formulae on your arms, so you're not one to talk."

"And my stomach, and my shoulders." Mari wiggled her eyebrows. "Sometimes other places."

"Grow up." Hikari buried her face in her hands, it burning a steady red out of embarrassment for Mari.

"Flirting with formulas, yes," Asuka snorted. Mari opened her mouth to retort, but the teacher walked past, handing out the next assignment, and her reply died in her throat as she pretended she hadn't just been talking in class. Asuka took the opportunity to look back down at her hands, memorizing the curve of the letters, and how small they appeared next to hers. All she'd have to do was avoid guys named Rei. Easy. And then she'd be alright.

* * *

Apparently Rei was a better listener than all the boys in Asuka's class. Since the day she'd told Rei to stop, there had been no drawings on her- not anywhere, not even on her back, which she'd had Hikari check while changing for their physical exercise course. Mari told her she was being properly paranoid, since how was anyone supposed to draw on their own back- and Asuka had nearly socked her then and there.

But Mari had a point. This whole Writing business was getting to Asuka more than she'd like to admit. Sure, it'd probably blow over in a month or two more, and she'd forget exactly who it was she was supposed to keep an eye out for and life would go back to normal. She could ignore that small part of her, sequestered in the confines of the back of her mind, that wanted to see more of what Rei could do.

Mari's partner was obviously some sort of science nerd, Hikari had Toji (and if it hadn't been Toji, she would've just about died of shock) to write notes to in class, and Asuka… had willingly cut herself off. She sat in class, twirling her pencil around her fingers, unable to concentrate for more than brief moments at a time on the blackboard. Without her conscience guidance, she began to sketch something on the paper she was supposed to be taking notes on. Something that branched out, reaching for the edges of the paper, like if it suddenly overstepped its boundaries it would suddenly burst into reality and come to life.

It was a crude replication of what Rei had drawn on the day Asuka's Writing showed up- vines, crawling across the margins and into the neat spaces between what few words Asuka had jotted down. She considered transferring it to her skin, to see what Rei would do- it'd be funny, actually, to see how Rei reacted to its appearance- but wouldn't that just be encouraging him? Asuka hesitated, holding her wrist above the paper, casually rubbing away the lead smudges against her palm. Then she pressed the paper to her arm, making sure not to move it too much, sat back, and watched.

It didn't take long for Rei to notice the bunch of grey smudges that were Asuka's attempt at art. They stayed unchanged for a short moment, and then two words appeared on Asuka's thumb. 'What color?'

Without hesitating, Asuka wrote back, 'red'. There was a bit of a pause, and then the color started to appear, spiraling out from the center of Asuka's outline in shades of dark and light, blending together and making the image come alive. Asuka wondered how Rei was doing this, unable to tear her eyes off the color drifting across her arm, touching the petals with crimson and the stems and vines with a gentler, warmer red.

Rei finished coloring, and the image sat there for a moment by itself- just Asuka's grey and Rei's red, which in itself seemed unfamiliar. Then Rei wrote again. 'Do you want me to erase it?'

'I'll keep it', Asuka replied, turning her arm down against the desk so no one else could see. Then- 'thank you'.

There was no reply back, but Asuka could imagine the colors on her skin as the blush on Rei's face- or maybe just the one on her own.

'You draw pretty well for a guy', Asuka wrote, considered adding a smiley face, and stopped herself.

Three dots appeared on the back of her hand. For a minute, there was nothing more. Then Rei added 'I'm girl'.

Oh, Asuka thought. That would explain a lot of things. Like why her stomach was suddenly clenching with something that was either fear or surprise, or why her mouth was hanging open wide enough that she could be a pale imitation of a Nutcracker soldier. Or perhaps why Rei was so good at drawing. The bell to dismiss class rang, and Asuka couldn't pack fast enough, wanting to get to a bathroom so she could scrub the pencil markings from her arm, to get away from Hikari and Mari before they asked what was wrong, since there was no way they couldn't have noticed her reaction.

"Stupid system couldn't even have given me someone good," she muttered, shoving her arm into the sink and drenching it with water. "Too bad. I'm not into girls."

At least, that's what she told herself, all the way up until she had scrubbed her skin raw and all throughout her walk home.

* * *

It bothered her. It really did. It bothered her more than Mari's teasing and Hikari's constant asking if she was alright, more than the 99% she got on her history exam and the constant, incessantly irritating flirting from the boys who'd realized that Asuka was ignoring her Writing.

It bothered her so much that one day, Asuka grabbed Mari by the arm during lunch, hauled her halfway down the hall and into the stairwell, and essentially ended up shouting, "Who's your mate?"

Mari fixed Asuka with a bemused smile, a few giggles slipping out between her confused question. "My what now?"

"You know, your…" Asuka motioned to Mari's arm, once again dotted with what appeared to be molecular composition notes. "Who are they?"

"I don't know," Mari said. "I mean, we've exchanged names, but I haven't really-"

"I mean are they a guy or a girl?"

"Oh, that!" Mari laughed. "Girl. Thankfully. You know how I am around guys."

"You mean twice as annoying as usual and just as insufferable," Asuka said with a roll of her eyes. "Right."

"Why do you ask?" Mari's trademark smile filled the confines of the small stairwell. "Got the short end of the stick, did you?"

"You know this soulmate thing doesn't work for everyone, right? I mean, look at what happened with my parents."

"Your mileage may vary," Mari chirped sagely. "Now if you'll excuse me, I want to get back to my desk. There's an error in one of these atoms, and I need to correct it."

Mari walked off, rolling up her sleeve to better get at one of the molecules trailing all the way down her arm and around it. Asuka suppressed a groan and kicked the door, then let out a few choice swear words in German when the rebound flashed up her leg, numbing it. Everything was going the way of stupid.

Hoisting her 'don't talk to me if you want to live' face back on, Asuka began the slow trudge back to her classroom, dodging around the clumps of students occupying the hall and gathered around the windows. Sure, when she got back Hikari would immediately notice something was wrong and start mothering her again, but until then she could use a little time to herself. She hobbled over to an empty space by the windows and stared out at the underclassmen playing baseball in the school yard. The day before, she would've wondered if Rei was out there among them, perhaps the one swinging his bat around like a sword or the one lying back on the grass, staring at the clouds.

But there was no wonder in her eyes today- only disappointment, clouded by annoyance and the fervent hope that Rei, wherever she was, was somewhere very far away.

* * *

"What's wrong with liking girls?"

Asuka fixed Hikari with a look that blatantly read 'are you kidding me right now' and went back to her lunch, not bothering to answer verbally.

"I'm serious!" Hikari said, leaning over Asuka's desk. "No one's going to judge you, or if they do, you'll… probably smash their face into a desk actually, please don't do that-"

"I'm not doing anything," Asuka sighed. "That's the point. Whoever this Rei is, she can go her way, and I'll go mine. Now will you just drop it?"

"No luck, Princess." Mari leaned over, her grin positively cat-like. "You and Hikari wouldn't let up for weeks when my Writing showed up. Now I get to return the favor, especially Hikari here didn't let us enjoy her soulmate-identity crisis."

"I teased you because your soulmate was a nerd," Asuka said pointedly. "And you are too. You're a perfect match."

"And you and Rei could be just the same!" Mari flashed her teeth at Asuka. "She's the art nerd, you're the... "

"Person who wants nothing to do with this, and if you would kindly shut up now, that would be great." Asuka laid her head on her desk, pushing away her lunch. "Anyway, what's the point? We're still in high school. You can't expect me to just run off to try and find someone who might not even be near me."

"Point to Asuka. Hikari, do you have a rebuttal?"

"I didn't realize this had become a debate," said the class rep.

"Point to Hikari!"

"That didn't even make sense!" Asuka stood, shoving her chair back under her desk, and rolled her eyes. "I'm going to get a drink. You two are driving me crazy."

"Mission successful!" Mari laughed, high-fiving herself. Hikari shook her head and went back to her lunch, until Toji moved his chair to fill Asuka's empty space and struck up a conversation with her.

Asuka turned down the hall to the bathroom, propping herself against the water fountain and drinking from it before dousing her face in it. Some of it splashed onto her uniform, but it was just water: it would dry. She stepped back from the fountain, drying her face with the backs of her hands, and paused.

A red stain was spreading across her left arm, oozing faster than Asuka had seen ink move before. It didn't look like the red that Rei had used several weeks ago. In fact, if she didn't know better Asuka would've thought it looked like-

She tore back down the hall at an impossible speed, slingshotting herself into the classroom with the help of the door frame and bowling over Toji and Kensuke in her haste to shove her arm before Hikari. "What is this?" She demanded.

Hikari's reaction told Asuka everything she needed to know. "Did you cut yourself?" She asked, grabbing for Asuka's arm and looking it over for an injury.

"It's not mine," Asuka said quietly, watching as Hikari touched her fingers to the still-spreading stain. They came away clean, as Asuka had suspected they would. She stopped the name from leaving her, but only for as long as it took for her to whip back around, grab a pen from her bag, and run back into the hall.

She hunkered down in a secure corner of the hall, where no one would come- mainly because the only thing down there was the fire escape, which smelled of damp stone and rust. 'The hell happened?' Asuka wrote on the wrist of the non-bloodied arm. She was writing with her non-dominant hand, so the letters were shaky and misshapen, but still legible.

She waited for half of the lunch period before there was a response. 'Cut myself in lab', Rei wrote, her own writing coming slowly. 'I'm okay', she continued, before wiping those messages away with whatever solvent was being used on her injured arm.

'Don't scare me like that', Asuka wrote, and scratched that out furiously, hoping Rei didn't see it. 'Be more careful. I don't want to end up in class looking like I just died'.

'Sorry', Rei replied, cleaning the last of the blood off her arm. There was no injury under it; Asuka guessed it didn't really qualify as 'ink', but for some reason the inability to see how badly Rei was hurt concerned her.

'It's okay,' Asuka wrote back, wondering why it was that she felt so much more relieved, when just an hour before she hadn't given a damn about Rei at all. 'Like I said. Be careful'.

'I will', Rei promised. Asuka almost expected another message after that, but there was none. She waited a few more minutes, until the school bell rang again and she had to go back to class, where she was greeted by Hikari and Mari, who bombarded her with questions until the teacher arrived to instate order.

If she had been looking down at her arm, though, Asuka would've noticed a tiny heart outline itself on her skin in black ink, linger for a moment, and vanish as suddenly as it came.

* * *

In retrospect, someone should've thought of a way to keep people with the Writing from cheating on exams. Sure, short sleeves were mandatory, but that didn't stop people from trying, if the way Hikari kept 'casually' doodling on her fingertips was any indicator. Mari didn't need to cheat, and Asuka wasn't about to suddenly ask Rei for answers to a test she wasn't even sure Rei would know the answers to.

But the feeling of exhilaration that came with spring break made Asuka feel reckless, so she got a pen out and wrote, 'I'm on break now', then started wiping it away while the ink was still wet. To her surprise, Rei wrote back almost immediately.

'I got out yesterday'.

"Well, good for you," Asuka muttered. More words branched out across her skin.

'Any plans?'

Asuka paused, holding the pen above her skin. She'd talked about meeting up with Mari and Hikari, but they hadn't settled on anything. And of course, there was the unspoken question of whether Asuka would like to divulge enough about herself to let Rei find her. Maybe she would, if she could travel to some place far enough away from home that Rei wouldn't immediately make the connection, so she could get the satisfaction of yelling in Rei's face about that one incident.

Instead she wrote back something completely stupid. 'Why, want to draw together or something?'

Asuka felt Rei pause even from so many miles away. 'Draw what?'

'Anything. You outline, I'll color. It'll be'... Asuka mulled over the last word. Fun probably wasn't what she was looking for. Even if it did turn out to be fun, it would still be encouraging her. 'Something to do', she wrote at last.

'Tomorrow?'

'Why not.' It wasn't like the others would be so eager to meet up after only a day. '11 AM?'

'Sure.'

Asuka nodded and wiped the ink from her arms, already thinking of a place where she could sit while she and Rei drew. Not like this was because she wanted to get close to Rei or anything; no. This was just something to kill time between meeting up with friends. And the reason she couldn't take her mind off this arrangement had nothing to do with the pounding of her pulse; nothing to do with the quiet, excited humming in her chest at the thought of watching Rei draw again.

But the feeling persisted, all throughout the night and into the morning. It roused Asuka from her bed, nudged her out the door and into the street, where she wandered around aimlessly before finding her way into the coffee shop she'd had in mind the day before. She ordered a drink and slid into a corner booth, spreading the few ink pens she'd brought with her across the table.

It was still half an hour to eleven when the door opened with a little jingle and another girl walked in. The only reason Asuka took notice of her was the light blue color of her hair, which in itself wasn't that odd- plenty of people dyed their hair- but this blue was the same shade that Rei had used the first time Asuka saw her draw. Then she went back to sipping at her drink and knocking her pens around the table.

At eleven sharp, a line of words appeared on Asuka's palm. 'Are you there?'

Asuka grabbed the nearest pen- a dark purple one- and wrote back immediately, 'Yes.'

Rei wiped her initial question away, replacing it with another. 'What should we draw?'

'Up to you'. Rei's message vanished after a short moment, and while Asuka rubbed at hers to remove it, she noticed a thin line of ink trailing its way down from the joint of her wrist. A moment later it began to branch out, not like the previous drawings had before, but taking on a different shape. Asuka's forehead creased as she stared at the image slowly forming on her arm with careful, measured strokes.

Slowly, everything began to fall into place. The first thing Asuka recognized as anything other than just ink was the shape of a tree, tall and leafy. Under it was a bench, wide enough for three people to sit on; by that was a lamp post. Rei must've been drawing whatever was in sight. Asuka uncapped the green pen and began filling in the lines of the tree, occasionally looking down her arm to see what else Rei had put there.

A few minutes into coloring, something struck her as odd, and Asuka looked down again. The entire scene seemed familiar, like she'd seen it before. Which was impossible, since the Writing only affected skin, and unless this Rei was telepathic, there was no way she could be getting into Asuka's mind. Asuka sighed and glanced up, staring out the window, and her eyes widened. She looked down at her arm- back up- and back down again. It was, aside from the lack of color on her skin and the presence of people outside, a perfect match.

Her first instinct was to stand and go, to find somewhere else to sit down just to put some distance between them. She swept the coffee shop with her eyes, flitting from one person to the next. No; it wasn't the barista, she was busy serving the customers. None of them were carrying pens, either. There was no one sitting nearby, but Asuka still kept searching. Unless there was an identical street somewhere in Tokyo-3, Rei had to be somewhere nearby.

And then she remembered the girl with the blue hair, with her small canvas bag tucked neatly under her arms when she walked into the shop. Asuka twisted around a bit further, and caught a glimpse of that same blue hair through a gap between the bodies waiting in line. Someone got their drink and shuffled off; the line moved, and when Asuka could look again, the girl was staring down at her arm and frowning.

'Asuka?' wrote itself across her arm. Asuka glanced back up to see the other girl lifting a pen away from her own arm, still frowning. Even from across the shop, she could see the girl's brows knitting together with concern. Asuka hesitated with her hand on her collection of pens. She could leave now, and Rei wouldn't know a thing- but then they might never meet again. Hadn't that been what she wanted? Rei was writing again, but Asuka didn't look down at her arm; she didn't want to. She took a few quick breaths, calculating the distance from her seat to the door- and then she slung her bag on her shoulder, tossed her empty coffee cup into a trash bin, and started across the shop.

Rei was still looking at her arm with that confused, adorable expression when Asuka came over. She looked up at the other's approach, doubtless wondering what she want. "The seat across from me is open if you want it," she said.

"Rei?" asked Asuka. Rei's brows scrunched even closer together, causing Asuka's breath to catch in her throat. But Rei nodded warily, lowering her arm and hiding it beneath the table.

"Do you… go to my school?"

Asuka laughed, placing her bag on the seat opposite Rei's. "Probably not," she said. "I mean, I think someone would have mentioned if someone cut their arm in a lab." Rei's face went blank with realization, looking utterly stunned when Asuka lifted her arm to show Rei the half-completed picture.

"Asuka."

"Yep, that's me," Asuka said, sliding into Rei's booth. "Funny meeting you here."

"I…" Rei paused, looking around as if to confirm that she wasn't in a dream, then focused back on Asuka. "How did you know I would be here?"

"I didn't," Asuka admitted. "I just thought this would be a nice place to sit while… you know." She gestured to their arms and at the various pens and pencils cluttering Rei's half of the table. "You're um… not what I expected."

"Is that a bad thing?"

"No!" Asuka sat up, almost reaching across the table before she recalled who it was she was talking to, and where they were. Damn emotions, making her act strangely. "Well, I thought you were a guy at first, you know? Your name."

"And?" Rei prompted.

"And. I…" Asuka cast her mind around, looking for anything that could break this awkward line of conversation. She found one that was only marginally better, but she would take her chances with it. "And what is this, by the way? Now that we're both in the same place. Is this… a meeting? A date?"

Rei started with a backward jerk of her shoulders, like her body had tried to put some extra space between herself and Asuka, only to have that command rejected halfway through. "I…" she began, and finished with a shrug. "The Writing. You don't… always have to listen to it."

And that Asuka would know. After all, she'd nearly turned and walked out on it. But here she was, sitting across from Rei, who was seriously making her reconsider her stance on liking girls. Or maybe not girls in general- just Rei. "We could always give it a shot," she suggested, but still unable to believe it was her mouth those words were coming from. A hopeless romantic she was not, but at the moment, she was acting just like one.

"Is this a… date, then?" Rei ventured carefully. Her eyes scanned Asuka's face for anything, a betrayal of emotions that would tell her that she wasn't wanted here. But no such betrayal came, and instead Asuka leaned back, scratching her head.

"I guess you could say that," Asuka said. "More a blind date than anything, since I don't really know anything about you." Rei's face fell, and Asuka added, "That's not a bad thing! Just… we'll have somewhere to start."

"Oh. Okay." Rei exhaled, her shoulders slumping as the breath left her. "I… well-"

"I'm Asuka. Asuka Langley Soryu," Asuka said, extending her hand across the table.

"Rei Ayanami."

They shook hands, but Asuka held on for a moment longer, and another when Rei didn't pull away. For her part, Rei seemed content to maintain the contact, and smiled when Asuka rested their joined hands on the table between Rei's coffee and the jumble of pens. And she kept smiling when Asuka bit her lip and launched into a short introduction of herself, content to let her talk until she had exhausted herself. She was sure she wouldn't remember half the things that Asuka said, but there would be time for that later.

For now, this was a start, and that was more than enough.


End file.
